Instead, the experts—including lawyer Lee Buchheit, academic Mitu Gulati and former IMF deputy managing director Anne Krueger– advocate gentler treatment of private-sector creditors. To buy time for a country receiving a bailout, they argue existing debt holders should be compelled to extend debt maturities by three to five years.

Government debt has tied the fates of sovereigns and banks in the euro area. Greece’s debt restructuring, history’s largest, was delayed for two years to spring 2012 because euro-zone banks weren’t ready to absorb the losses any earlier, as the IMF has admitted.

According to a story in the New York Times Wednesday, IMF experts are working on turning the idea of pre-bailout restructurings into IMF policy, with a view to putting the proposal to the institution’s board.

The IMF has been toying with this since 2001. A history of the idea (this from your correspondent two years ago) reveals a perennial clash between experts who think it’s better to get debt in distressed countries cut sooner, and financial-sector advocates who believe restructurings should be avoided at all costs.

The IMF and the authors of this week’s paper agree on the need to have a framework in place to handle a government’s unsustainable debts before panic sets in. The expert group’s submission is that the IMF’s proposed pre-emptive bailout approach “may force the sovereign debtor into an unnecessary debt restructuring.”

Re-profiling — pushing debt-repayment schedules out into the future — immediately improves the sovereign’s ability to repay, though it doesn’t reduce the size of its debt burden.

Sure, there’ll be market punishment because even the mildest tweak of a bond contract translates into some kind of loss for lenders. But, the expert group claims, this should be manageable and the return to the market could be swift. In Uruguay, the capital-markets banishment following its 2003 debt profiling lasted 31 days. The extension will also give the IMF and the government time to determine whether there is a liquidity or a solvency crisis, and if a deeper cut in debt is really needed.

While euro-zone countries crawling out of the rubble of the crisis don’t appear now to be heading into a new financial meltdown, concerns over their heavy debts — and the IMF’s stance toward them – are unlikely to go away.

“The debate is directly a product of what happened in the euro zone and in particular what happened with Greece,” said Mr. Gulati of Duke University in an interview. “The IMF was drawn into providing part of the Greek bailout even though it seemed fairly clear that the debt was unsustainable. They’ve decided it’s just not in their interest to do that again.”

Mr. Gulati reads the IMF’s April paper as largely political. “It’s telling the Europeans that the IMF staff will not as easily acquiesce to providing funding to bail out private creditors in the future,” he said.

Euro-area governments, on the other hand, want nothing to do with that approach, having declared Greece’s debt restructuring “unique and exceptional.”

Despite recurring sovereign-debt crises, and periodic efforts to standardize the official response, the euro area appears wedded to ad hoc tactics. In any case, it’s still likely that governments’ continuing opposition to a more structured sovereign-bankruptcy regime will again kill plans to turn the April proposals into a lasting legal framework.

But that doesn’t mean that the euro zone will avoid the specter of more sovereign debt crises, Mr. Gulati said. In a number of countries, he said, “they’ll have to make the decision to somehow reduce the debt and impose cuts on private creditors.”

About Real Time Brussels

The Wall Street Journal’s Brussels blog is produced by the Brussels bureau of The Wall Street Journal and Dow Jones Newswires. The bureau has been headed since 2009 by Stephen Fidler, who was previously a correspondent and editor for the Financial Times and Reuters. Also posting regularly: Matthew Dalton, Viktoria Dendrinou, Tom Fairless, Naftali Bendavid, Laurence Norman, Gabriele Steinhauser and Valentina Pop.